effort is more pardonable than any perceptible ex, cess, for virtue has ever erred rather on the side of self-indulgence than of asceticism. . . . And so, in the end, and after all I am still young, I have learned that I cannot write. Is a little experience too much to pay for learning to know oneself? I think not, and that is why, now, I feel more like a success than a failure, because, finally, I do know myself, and because I have left no bad work. I can say with Macaulay: There are no lees in my wine. It is all the cream of the bottle. . . .
I have tried to do too much and that is why, perhaps, I have done nothing. I wanted to write a new Comédie Humaine. Instead, I have lived it. And now, I have come to the conclusion that that was all there was for me to do, just to live, as fully as possible. Sympathy and enthusiasm are something, after all. I must have communicated at least a shadow of these to the ideas and objects and people on whom I have bestowed them. Benozzo Gozzoli's frescoes—now, don't laugh at what I am going to say, because it is true when you understand it—are just so much more precious because I have loved them. They will give more people pleasure because I have given them my affection. This is something; indeed, next to the creation of the frescoes, perhaps it is everything.
There are two ways of becoming a writer: one, the cheaper, is to discover a formula: that is black magic; the other is to have the urge: that is white
